During his 26 years working for the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, Jimmie Nichols Jr. didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about vaping.
Now he’s being asked to preach about its dangers, especially to teens whose rising use of e-cigarettes is being called an epidemic.
“I think kids don’t realize the long-term consequences,” Nichols told the Greenwood Rotary Club Tuesday.
Earlier in the day, Nichols, who now works as a field representative for U.S. Rep. Michael Guest, had addressed two groups of students at Pillow Academy about vaping as well as illicit drug use.
He said that e-cigarettes — electronic devices that heat a liquid form of nicotine — have not been around long enough to know exactly what they do to a person’s body, but he’s convinced it’s not good.
Most e-cigarettes use an oil-based liquid, which the device vaporizes but which will later turn back into a solid in the user’s body after the vapor has been inhaled, Nichols said: “They’re coating the insides of their lungs, their sinus cavities, bronchial tubes and all this stuff with this oil-based liquid basically.”
Although some argue that e-cigarettes are safer than tobacco cigarettes, that doesn’t make vaping safe, Nichols said. “Some of the stuff that they’re putting into these pens now is literally just crazy, some of the chemicals. The majority of it is nothing more than just poison.”
And that’s when teens are vaping as a way to get a nicotine fix. The electronic devices can also be used to deliver marijuana and other drugs.
“It’s very important that us as adults, grandparents, uncles, aunts, whoever, pay attention to what your kids are doing,” he said.
The former undercover narcotics agent also is skeptical of the medical marijuana initiative that Mississippi voters overwhelmingly passed in November.
He said he expects that when the dispensing begins this summer, it will fuel increased marijuana use for recreational purposes as well.
On a trip this past weekend to New Orleans, Nichols said, he was stunned by how prevalent marijuana was in the French Quarter. He believes it may, in part, be due to medical marijuana, which has been dispensed in Louisiana since 2019.
“I’ve never seen that much dope being smoked in one place in my life,” he said of his walk along Bourbon Street.
“Everybody down there must have glaucoma because every one of them was smoking a joint, a blunt or a pipe,” he said.
•Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
